Facebook hits 300m users – but has UK peaked?

The guys at Facebook – or to be more accurate, the top guy, Mark Zuckerberg – announced yesterday via their blog that Facebook is now reaching 300 million users around the globe. A remarkable milestone, and one which apparently shows no sign of slowing. Even better news for them, they’re now making money! Here’s what Zuck had to say:

“We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.”

Facebook has reached this momentous number in just over 5 years, and as you’ll see from Mark Zuckerberg’s blog posts, they’ve added the most recent 100 million in less than 6 months.

As regular readers will know, I keep a fairly close eye on these numbers, and in particular how individual countries are growing in their FB usage. Updating my numbers today, I noticed an interesting stat – UK Facebook usage seems to have plateaued at around 20 million. Have we reached saturation point? With almost a third of the UK population now a member of the site, it’s certainly viable that we may have ‘peaked’ – and 20 million certainly isn’t a number Facebook UK are going to be too embarassed about.

But I somehow doubt we’ve peaked quite yet – as you’ll also see from the graph, there have been a few other plateaus in the numbers before. But it’s very interesting to compare the UK growth, which at one point was the most impressive / fast compared to other areas, and how this has slowed. If countries like Turkey and Indonesia continue to grow at the rapid pace they have been, they could easily overtake the UK by the middle of 2010.